Pixel Perfect

Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality.

“I look at life as retouching,” Dangin says. “Makeup, clothes are just a transformation of what you want to look like.” Photograph by Josef Astor.

For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple’s yacht. “I call her, I say, ‘I come to your yacht at sunset, I take your picture,’ ” Demarchelier recalled not long ago. He took a dinghy to the larger boat, where he was greeted by the woman, who, to his surprise, was not wearing any clothes.

“I want a picture that will excite my husband,” she said.

Capturing such an image, by Demarchelier’s reckoning, proved to be difficult. “I cannot take good picture,” he said. “Short legs, so much done to her face it was flat.” Demarchelier finished the sitting and wondered what to do. Eventually, he picked up the phone: “I call Pascal. ‘Make her legs long!’ ”

Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria’s Secret).

Vanity Fair, W, Harper’s Bazaar, Allure, French Vogue, Italian Vogue, V, and the Times Magazine, among others, also use Dangin. Many photographers, including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, rarely work with anyone else. Around thirty celebrities keep him on retainer, in order to insure that any portrait of them that appears in any outlet passes through his shop, to be scrubbed of crow’s-feet and stray hairs. Dangin’s company, Box Studios, has eighty employees and occupies a four-story warehouse in the meatpacking district. “I have Patrick!” an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the editor of Runway, exclaims in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but her real-life counterparts probably log as much time speed-dialling Pascal.

Dangin is, by all accounts, an adept plumper of breasts and shrinker of pores. Using the principles of anatomy and perspective, he is able to smooth a blemish or a blip (“anomalies,” he calls them) with a painterly subtlety. Dennis Freedman, the creative director of W, said, “He has this ability to make moves in someone’s facial structure or body. I’ll look at someone, and I’ll think, Can we redefine the cheek? Can we, you know, change a little bit the outline of the face to bring definition? He, on the other hand, will say, ‘No, no, no, it’s her neck.’ He will see it in a way that the majority of people don’t see it.” Dangin salvaged a recent project at W by making a minute adjustment to the angle of a shoulder blade.

The obvious way to characterize Dangin, as a human Oxy pad, is a reductive one—any art student with a Mac can wipe out a zit. His success lies, rather, in his ability to marry technical prowess to an aesthetic sensibility: his clients are paying for his eye, and his mind, as much as for his hand. Those who work with Dangin describe him as a sort of photo whisperer, able to coax possibilities, palettes, and shadings out of pictures that even the person who shot them may not have imagined possible. To construct Annie Leibovitz’s elaborate tableaux—the “Sopranos” ads, for example—he takes apart dozens of separate pictures and puts them back together so that the seams don’t show. (Misaligned windows are a particular peeve.) He has been known to work for days tinting a field of grass what he considers the most expressive shade of green. “Most green grass that has been electronically enhanced, you know, you look at it and you get a headache,” Dangin said recently. He prefers a muted hue—“much redder, almost brown in a way”—that is meant to recall the multilayered green of Kodachrome film.

As renowned as Dangin is in fashion and photographic circles, his work, with its whiff of black magic, is not often discussed outside of them. (He is not, for instance, credited in magazines.) His hold on the business derives from the pervasive belief that he possesses some ineffable, savantlike sympathy for the soul of a picture, along with the vision (and maybe the ego) of its creator. “Just by the fact that he works with you, you think you’re good,” Leibovitz said. “If he works with you a lot, maybe you think, Well, maybe I’m worthwhile.”

His job description is enigmatic. People I asked about him invariably resorted to metaphor: he is a translator, an interpreter, a conductor, a ballet dancer articulating choreographed steps. These analogies, though, don’t account for pursuits that, while probably contributing less to Dangin’s income than wrinkle extermination does, occupy more of his time and intellect. He has become a master printer, “digitally remastering” old negatives and producing fine-art prints for exhibition. “When I see a print, I could probably tell you if it was a Pascal print,” Charlotte Cotton, the head of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said. “It’s immaculate, and there’s a kind of richness to the pixellation. It feels like you could almost sink your finger into it.” Books are another love: he is the publisher of SteidlDangin, an imprint of lush art volumes—for instance, a collection of a thousand Philip-Lorca diCorcia Polaroids.

A tinkerer and an autodidact, who started out as a hairdresser, Dangin brings to mind, actually, a building superintendent: he knows how to do a lot of jobs, and those he doesn’t he figures out through trial and error. He is, more than anything, the consigliere for a generation of photographers uncomfortable with, or uninterested in, the details of digital technology. According to Cotton, “Pascal is actually an unwritten author of what is leading the newest areas of contemporary image-making.”

His digital brushstrokes can be as deliberate as Jasper Johns’s or John Currin’s are on canvas, but they are not as consistent—part of Dangin’s skill lies in being able to channel the style, and the fancy, of whatever photographer he is collaborating with. In the spring of 2004, the Prada campaign, shot by Steven Meisel, had a retro, vacationy look—tie-dyed cardigans, hairbands, sailboat prints. Using a Photoshop tool called a smudge brush, Dangin applied extra color to every pixel, giving the pictures—hard and flat, at the outset—a dreamy, impressionistic texture, as if they had been wrought in oil and chalk.

The walls of the third-floor meeting room at Dangin’s headquarters, on West Fourteenth Street, hold magnets in the manner of a refrigerator door. One afternoon in November, grease pencils, in the colors of the rainbow, were stuck, by magnets, to one wall. Nearby, several of Dangin’s assistants were hanging a blueprint—a scaled rendition of the Petit Palais museum, in Paris, where, in September, Patrick Demarchelier will have a retrospective. Dangin was designing the exhibit, from the pictures (many of which he would retouch) and their frames down to the traffic-flow patterns of the museumgoers who would look at them. Dangin would do all of the printing. He was also publishing a companion monograph.

Demarchelier arrived shortly after two. The first order of business was to sift through several notebooks full of photographs to decide which ones to put in the show. Dangin and Demarchelier sat near each other, on two couches. “Ça, ça, ça, ça oui, ça oui, ça non,” Dangin said, marking his choices with a red grease pencil. “Ça on jette, non?” Demarchelier mostly followed the lead of Dangin (“Do you remember that story in French Vogue? Normandy? Wide angle?”), who drew quick, dismissive X’s over the pictures he did not like until the notebook resembled a game of tic-tac-toe.

Once the pictures had been narrowed down, Dangin began explaining to Demarchelier his concept for organizing the show. “Je pensais nuages d’images”—clouds of images—he began. He pointed to the blueprint, explaining that they should show lots of oversized prints, interspersed with thematic groupings of smaller portraits. Dangin had a plan for freestanding frames. “If we build an upside-down T, then we can just insert the print,” he said. “Two feet in Plexiglas and one riser casing. And the steel we can manufacture with José here in the shop.”

“Patrick, I’m going to show you American Vogue and Seven Jeans,” Dangin said, turning to some current projects. Dangin is on the short side, with a scruffy mustache and finger-in-the-socket frizz. He maintains the hours of a Presidential candidate; lately, he is a little tubbier than he would like. He was wearing, as is his custom, an all-navy outfit: New Balance sneakers, ratty cords, woollen sweater with holes in the armpits. He is not immune to the charms of things—he owns an Aston Martin, along with houses in Manhattan, Amagansett, and St. Bart’s—but, for someone who can pick apart a face in a matter of seconds (he once, apologetically, described his eyes as “high-speed scanners”), he is remarkably free of vanity. “I’m not a stud,” he told me one day. “I don’t have the six-pack chocolate bars, I have a belly. Would I want to look like that? Yes. Am I ever going to achieve that? No. Am I happy? Yes.” He has an earthy streak and a digressive manner of thought, but he issues orders commandingly.

Dangin and Demarchelier walked over to a wall affixed with a dozen color photographs of a famous actress in her late twenties. Demarchelier approached one of them, a closeup of the actress’s face. She was smiling, her head slightly tilted, posed in front of a swimming pool.

“Let’s soften the lines around her mouth,” Demarchelier said, tracing the actress’s nasolabial folds and the flume of her upper lip with the tip of one of the temples of his eyeglasses.

Dangin grabbed a grease pencil off the wall. “The blue in the background is off. We have to make that brighter. Especially for the cover.” By the time they were done, the actress’s face was streaked with black markings, like a football player’s.

They moved on to the jeans campaign. Dangin thought the model’s face was too “crunchy” (meaning that the contrast was high, making her look severe); Demarchelier wanted the denim—a pair of white bell-bottoms—to pop. “Then the only thing is the background here—is it too heavy compared to that one?” Dangin asked, comparing two pictures with the same windswept hills. “See the gradient here? This is a little more black-and-white, this is a little more gray. I prefer that,” he said, indicating the shot with the richer contrast.

Several days later, Demarchelier returned to the studio to continue winnowing images for the show. The conversation turned to which shot to include of another well-known actress.

“I like her in this one, because she looks very natural,” Dangin said.

“Yes,” Demarchelier agreed. “In that other pose, she looks like an actress.”

“But she’s also very good here,” Dangin said, of a shot that showed her partially nude.

“Yes, she’s very beautiful in that position. Do you want to cut it?”

“No, no. I’m going to keep it for the ass,” Dangin said.

“Maybe we could redo the ass.”

“Yes, the ass is quite heavy.”

Later, Dangin retreated to his basement workroom to refine the pictures. He likes to retouch alone, late into the night. His work does not always involve riddance. “During this whole period of grunge,” he told me, “I used to spend hours deciding, Which is the cool wrinkle to leave?”

Pascal Dangin began his career as a shampoo boy in a no-name salon in Paris’s Fifteenth Arrondissement. “I was with girls a lot, so that’s always good when you’re a teen-age boy,” he said one day at his office. “But what was fascinating was that I had to learn someone’s life in a very short amount of time. Like, fifteen seconds to figure out, Where does she go and eat? What does she wear? Is she married? Imagining this whole life and then defining a style for the person. Hair, to me, is really one of the most important retouchings that you can do. Because I look at life as retouching. Makeup, clothes are just an accessorization of your being, they are just a transformation of what you want to look like.”

Little in Dangin’s early life suggested that he was bound for distinction, or anywhere other than the various small towns in Corsica where he lived with his family. His mother was a piano teacher, his stepfather a classical guitarist. Dangin had two sisters and a tumultuous, itinerant childhood, which he does not like to recall. He was indifferent to music (he still is). One happy memory: His grandfather had a small press, on which he produced an underground newsletter about village politics. Dangin liked to stick twigs onto the cylinders and print the negative image.

Dangin left home at the age of fourteen. Just as he was settling into salon work in Paris, he was drafted by the French Army. “I had just done a lingerie show, my first taste of fashion,” he recalled, “and then, three days later, at 6 A.M., I’m in the barrack in the dead of winter.” Miserable, he spent his free time immersed in a biography of Coco Chanel. “I can honestly say, without sounding too corny, that Chanel and her story helped me through this ordeal. I loved that a woman in the twenties, someone back then, was as defiant as that.”

After three months in the Army, Dangin obtained a discharge and returned to Paris, resuming his work as a hairdresser. Every day, he sat at Café Flore reading the International Herald Tribune, until he could puzzle out bits of English. The next stage of his picaresque was a move to America, in 1989. “I symbolically left in January,” he said. He took the first flight out of Paris on New Year’s Day.

Dangin had always loved machines—“I am a manual-laborer type of guy,” he says—and while doing hair for photo shoots in New York he became interested in the crossover between cameras and computers. He had a friend who had a Mac Quadra. “We had a deal where at night I could use his computer,” Dangin recalled. “I used to go to his studio at seven-thirty, disconnect his computer, put it in a tote bag, and walk six blocks to my apartment. I’d work all night long, learning programming, and then by 7 A.M. have to stop so that when he woke up his computer would be there.”

Eventually, Dangin got a computer of his own, a Toshiba laptop. Hanging around shoots, he would make suggestions to photographers about how they could change their angles or correct their colors. A few of them began asking him to ply his effects on their images. “I always said no,” Dangin recalled. “I was very secretive in my studio. I hated the simple fact that, unless I got really good, I would have to be there waiting like a chimpanzee for someone to say, ‘Make it darker over here.’ ” He continued to hone his techniques and, in 1993, finally accepted his first paid retouching job: splicing a curtain onto a rod for the cover of a window-hangings brochure. In 1995, he married Laura Tiozzo, a fashion editor. The next year, their daughter, Cecilia, was born, and Dangin opened Box. Dangin and Tiozzo divorced in 2004. Two years later, he married Sarah West, a British-born former photography agent whom he had hired to work for Box in London. “Oh, God, he’s looking for perfection,” Sarah recalled thinking, upon becoming romantically involved with Dangin. “But he definitely separates it. He doesn’t sit at the computer and think, Phwoar, I wish I could give her one.”

One night in April, Dangin agreed to show me his basement laboratory. He led the way down a flight of stairs, past rows of shelves stacked to the ceiling with books and back issues of every conceivable publication. Enormous data processors, encased in glass cubes, whirred in the distance, as though we’d landed in a NASA laboratory. As a habitat, it suited Dangin, whose presence in the industry—shadowy as, by necessity, it is—is regarded almost mythologically. “Many people are deeply suspicious of Pascal and his control,” Charlotte Cotton told me. Dennis Freedman elaborated: “Because he’s not playing the music necessarily as it’s written, not unlike a conductor who can be criticized for taking too much liberty with the material—there’s a difference, you know, between Boulez and von Karajan—there are those, though I disagree with them, who may feel that sometimes he’s toointerpretive.”

On our way down, a young woman approached Dangin, her arm outstretched to support a proof of an ad for a men’s cologne. “There’s no hair there,” Dangin told her, pointing to a raw, shiny spot on the model’s forearm. “Either add hair or burn it in.” (“Burning” refers to deepening the color and texture of a picture by exposing the paper to more light.) “Let’s get rid of the black spots on his chest”—freckles, as they’re known in nature—“and add a little to the jaw.”

Finally, we reached a cool concrete room with no windows. It was pitch-dark, except for the ambient light of monitors. (For eighty hours a week, these screens are Dangin’s exclusive visual stimuli.) “This is what we call Las Vegas, because it’s always the same weather, it’s always the same time,” he said. “It’s always seventy degrees. If it rain, shine, snow, we don’t know.”

Dangin took a seat in front of a triptych of computer screens, all running Photoshop. Clicking the mouse, he pulled up a layout: a series of elaborate fashion pictures featuring an actress with a movie coming out this spring. In one of them, the actress was standing on the roof of a skyscraper. Dangin clicked again, and the picture changed almost imperceptibly, like a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture game for kids. In the “after” version, Dangin explained, he had shuffled the buildings in the background and eliminated an unsightly valve on the roof’s ledge. The sky had been too yellowy, which made Dangin think of pollution. “I gave it some more white,” he said, “like a Boucher painting.”

He proceeded to a shot of the actress reclining on a divan in a diaphanous couture gown. “She looks too small, because she’s teeny,” he said. On a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up, pleasingly, as if it had been fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.

Next, Dangin moved the mouse so that the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. Ultimately, he had minimized the actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin, and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix.

“Her face is too high and elongated, mainly by the angle of the camera,” he said. “But I love her, too. I don’t want her to become someone else.” He zoomed in so that her eyeball was the size of a fifty-cent piece. “I love all of this little wrinkle”—laugh lines, staying put—“and the texture of skin. As you retouch skin, you can very quickly shift the tonal value. If you put a highlight where shadow used to be, you’re morphing the way the orbital socket is structured. It leads to a very generic look.” (Another time, Dangin showed me how he had restructured the chest—higher, tighter—of an actress who, to his eye, seemed to have had a clumsy breast enhancement. Like a double negative, virtual plastic surgery cancelled out real plastic surgery, resulting in a believable look.)

In another shot, the actress stood in the middle of a busy city street, in front of a limestone building. Dangin blew up the segment of the screen that showed her feet, which were traversed with ropy blue veins. Click. Gone.

“There’s a little slumpiness, and the knees look really big,” he said, stroking a touch pad with a gray plastic stylus to contour the actress’s legs. Big knees. Small knees. Big knees. Small knees. He morphed them back and forth, as if viewing her in a fun-house mirror. The windows on the building seemed to have buckled, so he realigned their panes.

“Nothing is a problem and everything can be a problem,” he said.

Postproduction work is nothing new: by the eighteen-forties, less than twenty years after the invention of the permanent photograph, printmakers, using a mixture of pigment and gum arabic, were hand-tinting daguerreotypes to mimic painting. “There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries—we understand not less than £1 a day—in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation,” Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, the art historian and critic, noted in an essay in 1857.

But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity. Eastlake was responding to the distress of certain members of the London Photographic Society over a series of photographs taken deliberately out of focus. More recently, Kate Winslet protested that the digital slimming of her figure on the cover of British GQ was “excessive,” while Andy Roddick griped that Men’s Fitness exaggerated his biceps, saying, “Little did I know I have twenty-two-inch guns and a disappearing birthmark on my right arm.”

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

Retouchers, subjected to endless epistemological debates—are they simple conduits for social expectations of beauty, or shapers of such?—often resort to a don’t-shoot-the-messenger defense of their craft, familiar to repo guys and bail bondsmen. When I asked Dangin if the steroidal advantage that retouching gives to celebrities was unfair to ordinary people, he admitted that he was complicit in perpetuating unrealistic images of the human body, but said, “I’m just giving the supply to the demand.” (Fashion advertisements are not public-service announcements.)

“I think retouching is too much when it reaches the point of disfiguring,” Dangin said. “I want people to have an understanding of the skeleton and musculature and how it works. There is nothing worse than looking at an ankle or a calf that’s wrong. This is what bad retouching can do—you see in magazines girls having their legs slimmed and they no longer have tibias and femurs, and it’s weird.” William J. Mitchell’s book “The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era” offers some notable bloopers: the wife of a newspaper publisher in England insisted that the testicles be removed in a photograph of a prize bull, whereupon the bull’s owner sued for misrepresentation; the Orange County Register color-corrected a picture of a swimming pool that was supposed to illustrate a story about how vandals had dyed the water red. TV Guide was busted for grafting Oprah’s head onto Ann-Margret’s body—her husband noticed a familiar ring on the composite woman’s finger.

Dangin requires his artists to take in-house classes in anatomy and figure drawing; prospective hires must complete a fifty-six-question quiz covering everything from computer science to art history. Cheekbones, he said, are the classic locus of amateur flubs. “The minute you change this delicate balance of light and shadow, if you change by removing shadow because the girl has a lot of bad pores, suddenly this girl will look as if she has been Botoxed,” Dangin said. (The photographer Henry Peach Robinson concurred, writing, in 1896, “It is not, however, retouching in itself that is condemnable, but the bad retouching, at present almost universal, which turns the human face divine into a semblance of marble busts or, still worse, turnips or apple dumplings.”)

At one point, speaking of the Demarchelier project, I asked Dangin what he was planning to do with the actress’s buttocks, which had struck me as fairly enviable. “It is purely a proportion issue,” he said. “Because of the angle of the camera, her bottom might feel distorted, whereas if he had used a longer lens he probably would not have had the problem.” A good photograph, he said, directs the viewer in how to look at it. “So there’s scanning pattern—whether it’s three, four, or five points, there’s a hierarchy. You say, ‘O.K., I want the person to look face, back, legs, floor, and then maybe the background,’ or whatever it is. You guide the viewer through the visit of an image.”

“Pascal is no longer on pimple patrol,” Philip-Lorca diCorcia told me. “He has lots of well-trained pimple removers. He’s kind of free to hold the hand of his many temperamental photographers.”

As Dangin has developed relationships with photographers, his level of involvement in the making of their images has expanded. There are the varied ways he applies retouching itself: for fashion ads, for instance, he’ll do a Middle Eastern version, transposing clothes onto models who are showing too much skin.

Craig McDean told me, “On occasion I have prints and I give him carte blanche to do what he wants.” McDean shot Kate Moss for W. “I wanted to use old solarization techniques”—with solarization, light appears dark and dark appears light—“like I used to a long time ago. I showed Pascal some pictures by Man Ray, and he just does it himself without me sitting over him.”

People hire Dangin, in the broadest sense, for the assurance that behind every abstruse technical step there will be an artistic intention. “Technology is in many respects mechanical, but somebody’s got to run the machine,” diCorcia said. “And even with a program that comes on a disk there are a lot of subtleties. Pascal is tireless in exploiting all the capabilities of the technology and even possibly creating some new capabilities.” Dangin, to illustrate the idea that a large part of his currency is his assertion of taste, invoked the example of a successful plastic surgeon. “Why is there a Mr. Lips and a Mr. Hips and a Mr. Buttocks out there? Why do they exist? Because people have an idea about what they don’t want but not an idea about what they do. A doctor will do a million noses because he has a flair for what noses should be.” Despite his knack for the artificial, Dangin is a purist, in that he believes creativity should lead technology, rather than the other way around. “It’s dangerous when you just press a button and go, ‘Oh, that looks cool,’ without any reason why you’re doing it,” he said.

Dangin’s latest invention is a proprietary software package called Photoshoot. (He employs six full-time programmers at Box.) Its aim is to imbue digital photography with a specific sensibility—an opinion about the way pictures should look—of the sort that film once offered. “I am doing this because of necessity, because I believe the way that digital photography is done today is so wrong,” Dangin said one day. “Photography as we knew it, meaning film and Kodak and all that, was a very subjective process. With film images you had emotions. You used to go out and buy film like Fuji, because it was more saturated, or you liked Agfa because it gave you a rounded color palette.” With a ten-dollar roll of film, he explained, you were essentially buying ten dollars’ worth of someone’s ideas. “Software, right now, is objective. ‘Let the user create whatever he wants.’ Which is great, but it doesn’t really produce good photography.”

Occasionally, a client asks Dangin to attend a photo shoot, so that he can be in on shaping the images from the start. “If Linda”—Linda Wells, the editor of Allure—“wants the cover to be sunny, I can explain to the photographer,” Dangin said. “Sometimes it’s just mediating to everybody. I should have a diplomatic passport.”

In March, I met Dangin in Los Angeles, where he had gone to work on the Lanvin ad campaign, to be shot by Steven Meisel. At six in the morning, he picked me up at my hotel—in a red Mini Cooper—and drove to Smashbox Studios, a sprawling complex of soundstages in Culver City.

We arrived to a mostly empty set. Fifteen full-sized wheelie suitcases were waiting for the makeup artist, Pat McGrath. One of them was labelled “Gold-Blonde Wigs.” Dangin went to get a cup of coffee at the craft-services table.

Edward Enninful, the stylist for the shoot, greeted him, and they began to discuss another campaign they were working on, which had been shot earlier. Dangin had just received the raw pictures.

“It feels compromised,” Dangin said. “This way looks . . . bourgeois. It needs to be a little fucked up. Maybe I can do something with it.”

“See if you can.”

Dangin approached the middle of the soundstage, where a team of P.A.s, like roadies setting up for a concert, were unloading coils of wire and cable and a huge apparatus that looked like an industrial-sized toaster oven (it turned out to be a printer). Dangin stage-directed as they dragged a couple of long tables to form an L-shaped console, where he would sit as Meisel shot, monitoring the action on two large computer screens, like an assistant director on an action movie.

“Have you seen the new fibre paper that came out?” one of the assistants asked Dangin.

“Yeah, it’s not very good.”

Dangin grabbed a box of printer paper from his console and handed pieces out to each of the assistants, who ogled it, checking every angle for fibre and gloss, in the way of shoppers at the grocery store feeling up the fruit.

There were two models on hand, Liya Kebede and Raquel Zimmerman. Meisel would shoot them separately against a black dropcloth—equivalent to the sort of blue screen a weatherman uses—to set off the movement of the clothes. The idea was for Dangin to take Meisel’s favorite shot of each woman and splice the two onto some sort of artificial urban background of his own creation.

Dangin huddled with Lanvin’s designer, Alber Elbaz, along with McGrath, Enninful, and the creative director for the ad campaign, Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. After some debate about just what sort of glamour the team was going for—“We’re doing our downtown smoky burlesque woman, right?” “So, rich rather than dangerous?”—Meisel arrived, and the shoot began.

At one point, Dangin, examining the pictures at his console, approached Meisel. He had an inspiration: he would be able to do a cool halo effect on the silhouettes of the models’ bodies if Meisel shot them with some backlighting, to simulate an exposure delay with the flash. Meisel came over to the computer table, where Dangin prepared a quick mockup. They switched to backlighting. (Dangin doesn’t always get his way. “Have the airbrushing elves at Vanity Fair gotten a little too nip-and-tucky in their April cover story on Madonna?” the Hollywood blog Defamer asked last month, after the Daily Mail pointed out that Madonna’s normally chiselled upper arms had been rendered almost unrecognizably svelte. I asked Dangin if the conspicuousness of the retouching was a failure on his part. “It’s not a failure, because she was very happy with the way she looked, and the magazine loved it,” he said. “Would I have done less personally? Yes.”)

Later that night, Dangin showed me some prototype images that were the result of the day’s work. One of them featured Kebede, wearing a black strapless gown with ruffles down the front, and Zimmerman, in a plum-colored dress that tied around the neck, in the middle of a dark city street. They looked kinetic, caught in mid-motion, as if they were about to hail a cab. Behind the pair were the blurry lights of New York in the rain. Or so it looked. Dangin had actually assembled the cityscape mostly from hundreds of random images that his staff had culled from the Internet. A restaurant marquee in the top left corner of the image was borrowed from a picture of Shanghai. The opposite side had looked inert, he thought, so he imported a white storefront from Amsterdam.

A few weeks later, in his studio, Dan gin returned to the magazine spread of the movie actress. “I love two colors next to each other that don’t really make sense, like baby blue and chocolate, or pale blue with orange,” he said, pulling the pictures up on the screen. He was in a philosophical mood. “I am fascinated with the way that color can be indicative of sentiment,” he continued. “Why do we have baby pink for girls? Where did that come from? In medieval color charts, there were not names such as red or blue, but they actually gave nature words, like beau soleil. We are so touched by color all the time.”

Dangin tapped his stylus on a touch pad. “I can change someone’s character just by doing work on the eyes,” he said. Using a slim paintbrush from the Tools menu of Photoshop, he began tracing black circles—as if applying eyeliner—around the woman’s lids. “Suddenly she looks more ‘vroom,’ see?” He erased the eyeliner and lowered the contrast curve. The woman’s eyes turned weak and filmy. “See how quickly she loses contact with the camera?” he said. “Suddenly, she is gone from this world.”

Dangin went back to the Tools menu, which he had customized with homemade implements that he had saved from other projects. There were round brushes of every thickness, like the phases of the moon, libraries of human lips and irises. He opened a file, and more bespoke effects appeared: “Flames/Smokes,” “Stars/Nights,” “Bubbles & Particles.” There was a pattern for a wrapping paper, called “Chocolate Box,” that he had made for Sarah out of a patchwork of their wedding pictures. Over the years, like a Hollywood prop master, Dangin has collected hundreds of “bump maps”: expandable three-dimensional templates of facial features given in gray scale. He had twenty-five hand-drawn pairs of eyelashes.

Dangin’s next dream, in addition to founding a photography school, is to open a postproduction facility in Los Angeles. (Last year, a private equity firm invested in Box.) “There’s a whole world of photography that is basically unknown to the world of cinematography,” he said. I wondered whether the recent omnipresence of paparazzi pictures, with their aggressively ungainly, megalensed closeups, had affected the way he constructs artifice. Pictures of stars with mustard on their chins and pictures of stars who appear to have never eaten, he suggested, form a necessary antimony of extremes, each equally unrealistic. “I think it’s probably a natural reaction to what we do in magazines,” he said. “The world needs almost, like, pills against it. It’s a natural reaction to have to the sort of plastering of perfection out there. But this world is not reality—it’s about drawing people toward an ideal vision, if we’re talking about fashion photography. You have to think that celebrities are playing roles the same way they do in movies.”

Days later, he was still perfecting the Lanvin campaign. In one version, the street had seemed too narrow, so he widened it: a Parisian boulevard born of a downtown alley. “The right side looked too boring,” he said, “so I put in some neon sign from Las Vegas.” He had streaked the models’ calves, so that a spotlight might have been shining on them from one of the looming warehouses. “I did this sort of vibration here,” he said, indicating stipples of brightness that fell across their faces. The halo effect was working—a watery crimson glow traced the outlines of the women’s figures, as if they were delineated by the flashing lights of an ambulance, reflected in a puddle. Somewhere in every picture, Dangin said, he likes to sneak in something red. ♦

Lauren Collins began working at The New Yorker in 2003 and became a staff writer in 2008.